US 'Intelligence' Boss Reveals 'Redacted' Date In The URL Of The File

from the or-in-the-other-version-of-the-document-you-already-released dept

We've written a few times about the latest document dump by James Clapper and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence this week, in which they declassified a large pile of documents (after being told to by the courts -- though they don't mention that part). But, one of the odder parts was that the dates were redacted on certain legal filings, such as the FISA Court order by judge Reggie Walton smacking the NSA around a bit for not complying with the law. Here's the end of that document with the date redacted:

From that, you can see that the redactions (in both) seem rather arbitrary (especially redacting the dates). In many cases, it's difficult to understand why any of these points were redacted in either document. For example, in the original declassification, the following is redacted, but is available in the new release:

The Court further ordered that it would allow NSA, for a period of 20 days, to continue to share the unminimized results of authorized queries of the PR/TT metadata with NSA analysts other than the limited number of analysts authorized to access such metadata, but that such sharing was not to continue beyond the 20-day period unless the government first satisfied the Court, by written submission, that such sharing is necessary and appropriate on an ongoing basis.

Either way, it says quite a lot (none of it good) about our "intelligence" professionals when they offer up a document with a redacted date (makes no sense in the first place), which is easily revealed by the very URL (wtf?) that the intelligence officials chose, and which is further undermined by the fact that the same document had already been declassified with totally different redactions (and which reveals the date). And we're supposed to believe these folks are smart enough to not screw up with all the data they're collecting on everyone?

it makes me wonder why these people are charged with looking after our safety and protecting us from terrorism and god knows what else in the first place, when they cant even get the same document redacted at the same points or know how to stop the date actually being completely revealed to all and sundry!!it seems as if it weren't for the enforced things they can do and force others to do, they couldn't secure their trousers!

It's simple really, they want you to think the document was ordered on 6-22-09 and don't want you to know the actual date, So they put it in the URL, allow everyone to make the assumption that is the date of the order without ever having to make the false claim and redact the real date. Tada :)